Videos with philosophy students

Molly Knight, Alex Gregory and I have been making videos with some students in the Philosophy Department, supported by the Digitally Ready Small Projects fund. One video is designed to tell prospective students a little about what it’s like to study philosophy with us. The other is designed to tell current and prospective students about the work placement option in Part 3.

A further aim of this project was for us to learn about video and video editing, acquiring skills for subsequent projects. None of us knew much about it before we started, and we’ve learned a lot – mainly in the form of practical know-how about the hardware and software, rather than any nuggets of wisdom I could write here. We borrowed video cameras from ITS (1st floor in the library; free and reliably available), and used Adobe Premiere Elements to edit the videos (available for a very reasonable price through the University’s software contractor, Civica).

Two tips for anyone else who’s new to videoing and trying something similar:

1. Try to make sure you get the same video camera each time you record. Different cameras format the video differently, and uniformity will save you lots of time in editing.

2. When you get stuck with the software, Google your problem. There’s almost invariably someone who’s had the problem, solved it, and written about it on a blog somewhere.